Among the many Education Department nominees waiting to be confirmed is one Frank Brogan, a man whose resume makes him a compelling match for the moment at hand. But he’s waited months to even make it out of committee.
The first member of his family to attend college, Brogan began his career as a fifth-grade teacher, then worked his way up through the ranks from assistant principal to principal to superintendent. By 1994, he was elected Florida’s commissioner of education, after which he was elected to serve as the Sunshine State’s lieutenant governor. Since leaving office, Brogan has served as a university president and as a chancellor of public universities in both Florida and Pennsylvania.
But something else stands out on his resume.
When Brogan, now nominated to serve as assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, was the assistant principal of Murray Middle School in 1985, a 14-year-old student entered the building with a gun. Brogan ran after him, chasing the boy into a field where he aimed the firearm straight at his assistant principal.
Here’s how an Associated Press report at the time described the rest of the encounter:
Brogan said he kept the student talking until the boy lowered his gun, but the youth panicked when he saw deputy sheriffs coming toward them. He started to raise the gun, but Brogan grabbed his hand and arm and “we wrestled for it,” he said.
The gun went off, but the bullet went into the ground several feet from the deputies. Then Brogan threw the weapon into the grass several feet away.
Last month, of course, another young man entered a Florida school with a gun, but the results were far more tragic.
As state and national officials have scrambled to negotiate solutions in the wake of the Feb. 14 shooting in Parkland, Fla., the Education Department admits it’s struggling to meet demands, pointing the finger at Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions’ ranking Democrat, Patty Murray of Washington. “We don’t have any Senate-confirmed senior staff that deal with the issues Florida wanted guidance on,” a department spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon last week, referring specifically to a task force assembled by Florida Governor Rick Scott. “None of the people you would send to that task force have been confirmed.”
Scott requested the presence of an official from the department, and Brogan attended a roundtable meeting on the matter, but Senate rules prohibit nominees from interacting with the offices they’ve been nominated to assume, limiting his ability to implement any proposals.
“Sen. Murray would rather keep qualified candidates on ice to appease the teachers’ unions than allow that expertise to be brought to that department,” the spokesperson told the Free Beacon. “Yet nobody has transparently made an argument about what makes these people unqualified, other than the fact that they support the president’s policies.”
The committee was set to vote on Brogan’s nomination Wednesday, the same day Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The vote was delayed, but it is now set to take place on Thursday. Brogan’s nomination was announced by the White House in mid-December.
